As such he forced the members of his church to dress plainer and he also enforced other changes in the direction of stricter plainness and less modern technology, e. g. he forbade to use of electronic calculators.
[5] Elmo Stoll helped a young couple, seekers of French-Canadian background, Marc Villeneuve and his wife, to join the Amish community at Aylmer.
In December 1989 the ministers of the Aylmer Amish settlement met to discuss five issues, Elmo and his followers had raised: Evangelizing outside the Plain churches, the use of the English language to reach seekers, Christian community of goods (like the Hutterites), the mandatory wearing of hats for men and the question of fellowship with other plain churches.
[6] So Elmo Stoll and his followers withdrew from the Amish church in Aylmer in September 1990 to organize a plain, horse-and-buggy, English-speaking community in Cookeville, Tennessee, that was rooted in Anabaptism.
[9] Two hundred acres with a dilapidated barn on it were bought in Cookeville, Tennessee and on October 5, 1990, Elmo Stoll and his followers arrived there.
Building houses without modern appliances was hard and with the help of several men from nearby Noah Hoover Mennonites from Scottsville, they dug the basements and foundations by hand.
[12] Stoll's charisma and the spiritual and theological openness of the group not only attracted Amish and people with an Old Order Mennonite or an Old German Baptist background, but also dozens of families and individuals from non-plain churches.
[13][14] The emphasis on voluntary poverty and the community of goods in the beginning made it impossible to save money to buy more land in other locations.
When Elmo Stoll died in 1998, there were five “Christian Communities”: After the early death of Elmo Stoll from heart failure, two of the "Christian Communities", Cookeville and Woodstock, disbanded while the one in Holland, KY and part of the one in Decatur, who moved to Delano, Tennessee, joined the Noah Hoover Mennonites,[17][18] a very plain horse and buggy Old Order group, that is rather more intentionalist minded than traditional.